Reviewing a book by the poet Stevie Smith in 1937, the year after
The Fourth Pig was published, Naomi Mitchison opened with a
characteristic cri de coeur: “Because I myself care passionately
about politics, because I am part of that ‘we’ which I am willing to
break my heart over, and can no longer properly feel myself an ‘I,’
because that seems to me to be the right thing for me to do and
be, I see no reason why everyone has got to. Stevie Smith can still
be an ‘I.’ And that’s good.” She is thinking about her contemporary’s
enviable singularity of experience and voice: “Such people
don’t have to be ‘we’; they can be ‘I,’ proudly and bouncingly as